A Murder most Fowl

A good friend of mine named Dan recently began to practice origami. Knowing my tastes, he offered to do up an origami raven, just so he could practice folding one. He was kind enough to do up a raven using paper with some indistinct script on it, the sort of thing that looks like it should say something, but it really doesn't (a.k.a., Asemic Writing). It came out beautifully. Dan knows me.

Then, I had an idea. I knew of my friend's hankering for paper to fold (apparently, this is very addictive), so I called him up from my local Hobby Lobby and offered to buy a whole bunch of paper, if he'd do up some more ravens for me. I'd buy 12" X 12" sheets, he could use one 6" X 6" quadrant of each to do up a bird, and he could keep the rest of the paper to use as he wanted. Done deal.

Then I thought. "I should buy a bird cage". There just so happened to be one on sale for half-off (those who shop Hobby Lobby already know that they have half-off sales on almost everything almost all the time. I wonder how they stay in business.), so I snatched it up.

A few days later, Dan texted me a photo of the birds-in-progress. It ended up that there was enough paper, when one included the two pieces of double-sided paper with the other single-sided sheets, to do 13 ravens. 13. That's a murder. How cool is that?

Here's how cool it is:

And as cool as this . . .

And here's a bird's-eye view (sorry, couldn't resist) . . .

So, now I have pets (other than Cthulhu and some martians, not pictured) in my writing area. And, yes, that is a World Fantasy Award with a Pinocchio nose attached to it in the upper right corner of the bottom picture (my mash up of HP Lovecraft and A Clockwork Orange). And, no, I didn't intentionally catch Flight, volume #3, in the background of the second photo. I just noticed that.

I am, as you might imagine, rather pleased.

Pardon the tacky stuff. If any of you brilliant crafters out there can think of a better way to get these birds to stay on, do tell. I had a bugger of a time of it, but, all-in-all, it turned out pretty well.

Nevermore.